Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 284 posts

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#221

Post by barrkel »

ddrager wrote: post #39

This has been coming for a while. We attempted to create a push-based notification system based on MQTT. It worked well, then the notifications started getting lost. Turns out, the receiver service was getting killed in the background. We found out the best way to get reliable notification was through Google's own GCM (which has now moved to Firebase Cloud Messaging. We learned its incredibly difficult, if not imposs…

Are Google push notifications reliable? They certainly don't work reliably for Gmail, I frequently don't find out about emails unti I open the app.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#222

Post by ahupp »

AstralStorm wrote: post #196
Ajedi32 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a wide variety of possible implementations of a notification service, and not all of them will necessarily be as power efficient as what Telegram-FOSS does.

And Android's battery monitoring should flag them accordingly, not rely on presence of some library.

It's not relying on the presence of a library. It's indicating that the app is still running in the background, and thus using more battery.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#223

Post by shawnz »

izacus wrote: post #89
megous wrote: post #35

Can this fall under system library exception? For example if you're building mingw32 based GPL C app, you're linking to all kinds of windows system libraries and there's no need for them to be under GPL. If this notification library is available to anyone on Android and is part of the Android system platform, can it be the same, like some DLL that does notifications on windows?

No it doesn't, because the code that receives push notifications isn't part of AOSP.

But my "system" isn't AOSP. It's my OEM's specific packaging of AOSP along with Google services and other components. Why should the line be drawn around AOSP specifically?

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#224

Post by black_puppydog »

kllrnohj wrote: post #178
soulofmischief wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're focusing on the entire picture. Some people here like iOS for the reasons you described. However I'm willing to bet, unless you can show me otherwise, that it's a vocal minority. I don't know of anyone personally who is happy that Apple disallows GPL code. Comparing Apple's digital Fort Knox with Google's unsupervised free-for-all is a false dichotomy. There exists a happy medium, where power use…

> There exists a happy medium, where power users get all the freedom they want but apps are still by default beholden to certain restrictions. And this is orthogonal to a proprietary API. Is this not the happy medium Google is trying to hit? Power users can unlock their bootloader and do whatever they want. This is still officially supported, with vendor blobs officially provided. By default things are restricted to…

For completeness' sake: even power users cannot really do with their devices as they please, if they don't happen to be kernel hackers with a few months' worth of time to spare.

If google was trying to hit some sweet spot (I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here any longer) then they would not spout such obviously wrong BS to scare users into submission. Conversations and telegram both put the work into doing push notifications The Right Way (TM) so scaring users about this is stupid at best.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#225

Post by bjelkeman-again »

pkaye wrote: post #210
Despegar wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is Apple has been the same from the beginning. There was no bait and switch. People who bought Apple products knew what Apple was and will be and what the terms were. With Google there is a bait and switch (and it doesn't really just apply to this particular story). They came to market defining themselves as the open alternative to Apple to get market share and developer interest (and evangelism), and…

Apple has the majority market share in the US. I think they need to be forced to open up for alternative app stores.

This data says that Android is bigger.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#226

Post by black_puppydog »

rjzzleep wrote: post #220
kllrnohj wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There exists a happy medium, where power users get all the freedom they want but apps are still by default beholden to certain restrictions. And this is orthogonal to a proprietary API. Is this not the happy medium Google is trying to hit? Power users can unlock their bootloader and do whatever they want. This is still officially supported, with vendor blobs officially provided. By default things are restricted to…

That's what I thought when I bought my Sony phone. Except when you unlock it you run a crippled version of the phone. Huawei recently stopped allowing bootloader unlocks. Unlocking the bootloader is becoming increasingly rare. To be honest, ignoring the back and forth between the discussions here, am the only one that doesn't get WHY the firebase library isn't open source? It could just be GPL right? Most of the inte…

I don't know the ins and outs of this, but wouldn't that still mean that the app would have to rely on google infrastructure to do push notifications? That might be a fix for the licensing problem, but it wouldn't address the problem that that would move virtually all remaining google-free (-ish) messengers into googles direction, with the potential for centrally siphoning of (meta-) data

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#227

Post by [deleted] »

damnyou wrote: post #148
jakear wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it depends on if the library is distributed with the app or with the system. In this case, the library would be distributed with the app I believe, meaning it would not be exempted.

I think this is true for GPLv2 but not for v3. But IANAL.

[deleted]

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#228

Post by saagarjha »

mehrdadn wrote: post #47
saagarjha wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I could, but I think it's fair for me to assume that the GitHub repository that the official website links to as the source code for their client is where they’d publish up-to-date code.

They might well publish it right there if you ask. Just saying they haven't violated the license as long as they have a written offer to provide you with the source code somehow if you ask. (That's what GPLv2 seems to require.)

I have asked.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#229

Post by Khaine »

“the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"” [1]

Not anymore. Having basic android open source help when everything is pushed into the proprietary play store

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/Arubin/status/27808662429

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#230

Post by parliament32 »

bchimp wrote: post #193
tjohns wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15-20 minutes for a high-priority FCM message isn't normal. Either your app is being rate limited by the server, or there's something unique about your network setup that is preventing push messages from getting through. There's not enough context here to know what's going on. (Plenty of instant messaging apps use high-priority FCM messages, and get near instant delivery.)

I agree, it isn't normal, and I was scratching my head at the time as to why FCM would deliver the messages near instantly on older android models . The delayed delivery happened on Oreo+ phones. Oddly, I also noticed Whatsapp not delivering messages in a timely fashion (even when I had it opted out of battery saving). Background notifications in general started acting odd for Oreo+ phones. > There's not enough conte…

Signal switched to FCM about 4 months ago and I've had constant delayed-notifications issues too, usually in the 20 minute range. I can see the problem in Signal itself, the "sent" and "delivered" timestamps will be 20 minutes apart despite be actively doing stuff on my phone -- so the internet connection is there and the phone isn't sleeping. When I actually re-open the Signal app all the notifications flood in at once.

Maybe Google is assuming I don't care about Signal notifications because I don't always "interact" with them right away (I'll leave messages on unread for a bit if I'm busy), but I really wish there was a way to mark Signal and other instant messaging apps as "always high priority". Signal has battery optimizations disabled but that doesn't seem to help.

Post reply on HN